A vehicle rental or vehicle hire agency is a company that rents cars, vans, trucks and the like for short periods of time ranging from several hours to several days or weeks in exchange for a fee. Vehicle rental agencies range from individual stores to national chains. The larger national chains are often organized with multiple local branches in a geographical region, which allows a user to return a vehicle to a location other than from where the vehicle is released.
The customer base for the vehicle rental agencies is mainly people who have a vehicle that is temporarily not accessible, for example, travelers to other regions who have not brought their own vehicle, or those whose vehicles are being serviced or repaired, as well as people who have a temporary need for a vehicle larger than their own.
In addition to renting out basic vehicles with basic features, rental agencies may also offer vehicles with advanced features such as 1) Infotainment functions, such as global positioning system (GPS) navigation, multimedia entertainment systems, traffic information receiver and 2) Additional Safety related features such as lane departure warning, collision avoidance, rear view cameras, adaptive cruise control, etc.
There are various drawbacks with the conventional vehicle rental process.
A significant number of the vehicles rented in the current rental industry are base model vehicles, sometimes provided with a value adding service such as a portable GPS device. Many of the rental agencies do not stock vehicles with a lot of advanced built-in features. This can be because they are more expensive for the rental agency to purchase and rent less frequently due to the higher rental premium. Therefore these more advanced vehicles are likely to represent higher capital expenditure and upkeep cost. Another practical consideration is that by stocking only the base vehicles, there is usually little added risk of turning customers away, as people renting a vehicle for a short term can usually settle for a vehicle that has only basic functions or basically “drives”, even if they have additional budget to pay for more advanced models.
Thus, there is the problem that renters of vehicles are not necessarily provided with the features they would like when renting a vehicle, which causes inconveniences and diminishes enjoyment of the vehicle.
Moreover, during the vehicle renting process, a customer's choice of model and features of the vehicle are primarily decided at the point of transaction. Once a customer has collected the key, and started using the vehicle, there is no opportunity to enhance the vehicle features, other than by returning the vehicle and swapping it for another.
In addition, there is the issue that the process of preparing a vehicle is labor-intensive and potentially error-prone. When a rental agency receives the choice of rental vehicle and add-on features, the request will passed to a specific mechanic to manually pick and configure a vehicle, which will account for labor and time cost.
Meanwhile, Near Field Communication (NFC) is a set of standards for smart phones and similar devices to establish radio communication with each other by touching them together or bringing them into close proximity, usually not more than some centimeters apart. Present and anticipated applications include contactless transactions, data exchange, and simplified setup of more complex communications such as Wi-Fi. Communication is also possible between an NFC device and an unpowered NFC chip. Those unpowered chips are usually called NFC tags. NFC tag reading/writing capabilities are integrated onto many recent smart phones.
Vehicular Communication Systems including V2V (vehicle to vehicle) and V2X (vehicle to infrastructure) are an emerging type of networks in which vehicles and roadside units are the communicating nodes; providing each other with information, such as safety warnings and traffic information. V2V and V2X are both technologies which enable intelligent transport communications, the main difference being whether the communication is between vehicles (V2V) or between vehicles and infrastructure (V2X). The two types of system may be mutually supportive, since vehicles can communicate with infrastructure indirectly using other vehicles as relay nodes. As a cooperative approach, vehicular communication systems can be more effective in avoiding accidents and traffic congestion than if each vehicle tries to solve these problems individually. V2V/V2X is also expected to facilitate driver assistance functions up to and including fully-autonomous vehicle operation (self-drive).
Generally vehicular networks are considered to contain two types of nodes; vehicles and roadside stations. One wireless technology proposed for V2V/V2X is Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC). DSRC works in 5.9 GHz band with bandwidth of 75 MHz and approximate range of 1000 m. The network should support both private data communications and public (mainly safety) communications but higher priority is given to public communications.
To date, however, such wireless technologies have not been applied to the process of vehicle rental.